Iron Maiden: The Final Frontier music video

Iron Maiden: The Final Frontier music videoDirection of film for iconic rock band

We wanted to share our 'Director's Theatrical Cut' which is infinitely our preferred version but after much discussion with Iron Maiden management, unfortunately we are prohibited from sharing it. Therefore this is the 'official' version.

We were approached by Darkside based on previous strong collaborations, to direct the spot and handle all the live action shoot production.An epic story was embarked upon seeing the cultivation of a visual space odyssey which had more than its fair share of nods to Sci-fi classics such as Alien, Predator and even Raiders Of The Lost Ark…The impetus for the project was the concept that the band themselves had conceived for the album – The band’s iconic guitarist Steve Harris having a vision of an astronaut floating in space.The team sat around a large table and thrashed out ( No ‘Metal’ pun intended ) a narrative that contained the largesse associated with the Heavy Metal Genre and also with Iron Maiden.We had a suitably huge set of scenes that were basically from the depths of the band’s fantasies. Some of the things we discussed were intimidating as they were huge action scenes – explosions, planet detonations etc.We knew that the piece needed it’s tongue firmly planted in its cheek (as Maiden are famed for their sense of humour), so we approached it in a kind of sci-fi mash-up way. Alien, Predator and an overt Raiders Of The Lost Ark homage are all in there. We wanted some of the on-screen worlds to feel like genuine film out-takes but at the same time the overtly bombastic storyline was never going to be ponderous…It was going to be a relentless finger in the eye of sci-fi cliches. The narrative is ‘loose’ to say the least but really in some ways the feast and overload of Sci-Fi cues IS the narrative.The intensive 3 day shoot that took place at various locations including a disused base in Rendlesham which coincidently happened to be the site of the UK’s foremost UFO incident ‘ The Rendlesham Forest Incident’ in 1980. Additional locations included an active powerstation in Dartford and a studio in Wimbledon.The final work was a worldwide Twitter trending topic (Third most tweeted about thing in the world at the time) and was ubiquitous across the bloggosphere.It featured as a headline on Myspace and was even featured in The Guardian.